Recommendations for Federal Legislation To Ensure the Integrity of our Democracy

[papau]

Recommendations for Federal Legislation To Ensure the Integrity of our Democracy

(under Copyright law (17 USC 106) but not trade secret rights -Prepared by Kathy Dopp, 435-658-4657, [email protected] Nov. 30, 2006 updated 12/9/2006)

http://electionarchive.org/ucvInfo/US/EI-FederalLegislationProposal.pdf

Recommendations for Federal Legislation To Ensure the Integrity of our Democracy

<snip>
1 Manual Audits: Require manual audits of machine vote counts sufficiently statistically valid to ensure that electronically-counted election outcomes are correct.

2 Voter Service Reports: Require states to submit timely reports of detailed election data that can be used to measure voter disenfranchisement and voter service levels.

3 Auditable Voting Systems: Provide funds for upgrading voting systems for jurisdictions that have unauditable voting systems, but fund only “fully-auditable” voting systems where all able-bodied voters can directly record votes on a paper ballot that is voter-verified.

4 Fund Manual Audits and Voter Service Reports: Provide funds for conducting sufficiently statistically valid manual audits of machine vote counts and for producing voter service reports in federal elections.

5 Teeth: Provide certain and swift penalties whenever an election jurisdiction fails in a transparency, auditing, or reporting obligation.

6 Public Election Records: Require election officials to make publicly available in original paper and electronic form all election data and election records that would reveal fraud or errors in elections or are necessary to verify voter service reports and manual audits, prior to certification of results.

7 Election Monitoring Website: Create a website containing a publicly accessible database for logging and tabulating voters’ complaints in elections; and for publicly displaying the auditable, audit, and voter service reports from the states.

8 Submission of Reports: Require state election officials to submit auditable, audit and voter service reports to the US GAO prior to state certification of election results.

9 Public Disclosure of Voting System Software: Require public disclosure of voting equipment as a condition of any further contracting to enable post-election voting machine integrity verification.

10 Prohibit Certain Network Connections: Outlaw Wide Area Network connections to, and wireless capability in, voting equipment and prohibit voting through any network.

11 Public Right to Observe: Require jurisdictions to allow citizens to observe all aspects of elections.

12 Vote Count Audit and Recount Committee: Create a U.S. Vote Count Audit and Recount Committee whose functions include approving state election audit and recount procedures and policies; and setting standards for state auditable, audit, and voter service reports.

13 Repository for Voting System Disclosure: Fund a repository for publicly disclosed voting system software or require “OVC Listed”.

14 Prohibit Practices that Disenfranchise Voters: See a specific list in “Detailed comments” section.


Definitions:
Auditable Report: means a report of detailed machine vote counts and ballots cast for each vote counting device in each precinct, for each election office, for each candidate and ballot contest, for each vote-type including Election Day, early, provisional, absentee, mail-in, military, etc. The auditable report must be released publicly prior to randomly selecting machine counts to audit so that the public can verify the audit. All ballot types must be tracked separately for that jurisdiction, from provisional to absentee to polling place electronic to polling place paper,... for each vote counting device for each race. <snip>

Prohibit Practices that Disenfranchise Voters: For example, Prohibit voting by public networks or by faxing ballots to any office other than the local election office; No onerous paper weight requirements for voter registration forms; Penalties for ballot tampering or vote fraud, and for fraudulently losing registration forms or changing them prior to submission; State issued ID not required, but any reasonable proof of residency for voter identification to vote; Voter sign-in system must be a paper system, not an electronic one subject to crashes or network failures; No one other than the voter or a non-partisan election official (or a postal clerk) may make any marks on a ballot envelope, except for an authorized person who returns a ballot to a polling place may sign it as required by the jurisdiction; Penalties for systematically challenging voters; Consider how voter rolls may be scrubbed for people who moved, died, or are convicted of crimes; Consider how voter registrations are verified against other databases. (Not everyone has a driver’s license or state issued ID card. Sometimes it is unclear what is a middle name or a compound last name; or people use different forms of their names. In some foreign names, the family name is first not last. For guidance on implementing voter registration databases see http://acm.org/usacm/VRD ); Paper ballots should be available at all polling locations for voters who prefer not to vote using electronic ballots and in case of long lines, power outages, or equipment failures. <snip>

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I recommend DUers email Congress to have reintroduced Holt Bill inc above -

Please support of HR 550, also known as the Holt Bill, but only as modified as suggested by Kathy Dopp.

We do not need a handover of election control to the executive branch as Holt's proposed regulatory agency would be, nor do we need contracted recount firms, but we all like

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE. This Act may be cited as the ‘‘Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2005’’.

SEC. 2. PROMOTING ACCURACY, INTEGRITY, AND SECURITY THROUGH VOTER-VERIFIED PERMANENT RECORD OR HARD COPY. (changing "verified" to "verifiable")

So lets get stricken from the Bill:

SEC. 4. PERMANENT EXTENSION OF AUTHORIZATION OF ELECTION ASSISTANCE COMMISSION.

SEC. 5. REQUIREMENT FOR MANDATORY MANUAL AUDITS BY HAND COUNT.

SEC. 6. REPEAL OF EXEMPTION OF ELECTION ASSISTANCE COMMISSION FROM CERTAIN GOVERNMENT CONTRACTING REQUIREMENTS.

and lets get Kathy's suggestions included in the Holt Bill.

Call Congressman Holt's office:

Congressman Rush Holt
District Office
50 Washington Rd.
West Windsor, NJ 08550
Phone - Fax -

Washington Office
1019 Longworth House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515
Phone - Fax -


Other Organizations you might want to check with to verify you want to support the Kathy Dopp modifications to the Holt Bill, with the EAC independent of the Executive Branch:

TrueMajority: [email protected]

VoteTrustUsa.org: [email protected]

[BeFree]

1. Not simple enough

What we need is for federal elections to be totally HCPB. HR6200.

Local elections can be controlled by locals, I don't care, but all federal offices impact me no matter where I live and I want to know that my fellow citizens are counting the votes.

550 excludes people from controlling federal elections and places that control in the hands of private profiteers. As long as voting=profits for a few, no system is safe.